Designing the decision: choice architecture in policy and service design

Theme: Public engagement

As you enter this session, you’ll be invited to participate in a live experiment that deconstructs how we make decisions.

Using a 2026 discovery case study from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, we’ll explore the ‘choice architecture’ of a public engagement service for the UK’s first Town of Culture competition. We will dive into how the framing of a question, the physical design of a ballot box and the chosen voting system can subtly influence participant behavior and outcomes.

You’ll leave with a practical toolkit to help you design more intentional choices in your own policies, services or products, and the participatory research methods to test if they actually work.

Participant takeaways:

• learn about choice architecture and how different decision-making approaches can fundamentally alter service outcomes
• understand the key role participatory research methods such as simulation can play in understanding how people interact with choice architecture in practice
• leave with a set of practical questions and techniques to audit and design choice architecture within your own work